Fall In Love Again
by its0the0ennui
Summary: James has always loved Lily. And as soon as Lily knows it she'll fall for him too, right? Well, not exactly. Seventh year the way Sirius Black saw it.
1. Chapter 1

**Fall In Love Again**

Chapter One: In Which James Loves

James inspired me; there really never was any sort of doubt about that. He was beautiful, witty, and magical in a sort of swirl of built up emotions that all wound up until they rudely burst out at anyone who got in his way. Even I saw that, and I wasn't supposed to.

He was my best friend growing up, the only one I could really talk to. I don't tell people that usually. It's not my way. But now that he's gone, things have to be different. I have to tell the truth to someone or I'll lose my soul. James wouldn't have wanted that.

He had set a path for himself a long time ago, when he was about seventeen, and he wouldn't have let anything get in his way. Not even me. Not even Lily.

And whatever good attributes Lily Evans did have, she always seemed to find herself right in front of James. He might have liked that well enough, seeing as she was so unusual in the way she never seemed to quite see him, but on the rare occasion that she did see the way he'd look at her, she would give him her most scathing look she could muster and walk as far away from him as she could get in the opposite direction from one James Potter.

I suppose she walked away from me too, but I never really liked girls who wouldn't look me in the eye. It was James, my bigheaded best friend in the entire magical world, who always seemed hurt by it. It deflated him, drained him too, until all he was was a teenage wizard completely smashing himself in love with a slightly strange redheaded teenage girl. Of course, he'd never tell me this and I never expected him to; whom he'd kissed between charms and herbology yesterday in the fifth floor broom closet was my territorial right to know, but love was a completely different matter. It was our silent agreement as friends that he had it bad.

But Lily still didn't notice. Perfect Prefect as she was, and Head Girl later on, she really wasn't as clever as I might have guessed. Between all my half smirks whenever her hand touched his (on the very rare, but somehow, more rapidly occurring occasion) and his stares at the way her hair seemed to weave into the wind as she walked, she should have known she had him wrapped around her every word. Even after the thirty-seventh time he asked her out, she still didn't understand. And by the hundredth time he asked her, she was so mad at him for reasons no one, except maybe her, understood that he looked at her and yelled it so loud that the entire school probably heard it.

"I LOVE YOU, LILY EVANS!"

And he really did. I just wish that was enough to inspire her too.

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I looked at James from my place on the velvet pouf. We were alone in the Room of Requirements, just seeking solitude from the rest of the castle. What we got looked more like a brothel than a haven. But we were sixteen then, and no matter what we wanted, we also wanted sex. I shook my head.

"You've fucked it up this time."

"Yeah?" he asked. His voice was quiet and flat, a little sad too, and I couldn't imagine him like that anywhere but there in the dark, dust, red room.

"Yeah, mate,"

I could hear him sigh, and I rubbed my face with my hand. I didn't want to be the grim reaper. Telling him that Lily would never love him was like telling him magic didn't exist, that we were sitting in the tree fort at Godric's Hollow and pretending we were in a castle doing great things. I couldn't tell James things like that.

"Do cheering charms make you forget things like this?"

I shook my head no.

"Not even for an hour?"

"Doubt it,"

He grinned at me. I mean, really smiled. It wasn't the normal, self-satisfied one, but it told me everything would be okay, even if it wasn't right then. I guess he just didn't know what he was facing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Fall In Love Again**

Chapter Two: In Which Talking and the Lack Thereof Become Appreciated

Lily had a loud voice. I remember that much- it's something I can't ever forget. I don't mean she ever used it; it's just that we all knew it was there. Maybe we could tell by the way she talked to James, with her head tilted up a little but with her eyes still looking down at her shoes, and how she still called him a 'toe-rag' like that was the harshest word in the dictionary (and it probably was for her, with her prefect badge and perfect manners). Lily was nice, I mean the girl had everything from nice grades to nice looks, but she still had that redhead temper. And 'toe-rag' was the way she expressed it.

I think it was just after James had told her he loved her that she started dating Amos Diggory. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd always figured he was her first boyfriend. And she was definitely loud with him. You could hear her in broom closets and empty classrooms for two months before it all finally came undone. And with the way she was with James, the way anytime James passed her she laugh louder with a big, "Amos, not_ here_" thrown in somewhere, there was no way it was going to last.

I don't think Amos knew about James and Lily, beyond that James made her feel something horrible. And if he did know about the things James did or said or thought about Lily Evans, he didn't care. They were friends, even, all through school. I hated that. I hated that so much, I punched him once for kissing Lily.

And that made everything worse.

It was a Saturday. I remember because of the Quiditch match- Hufflepuff versus Slytherin. We didn't want to be there, Remus, James, and I. Watching the Hufflepuff team losing by forty points to assholes like Goyle and Nott hurt like it was the Gryffindors losing. We weren't there for support, or pain, or cheering though. James just wanted to see Amos lose. I guess he figured that Quiditch and Lily were just as good, so that then losing Quiditch was losing Lily (I can tell you now that James only lost one match after his first date with her).

By the time Hufflepuff was sixty points down, James was a little flushed and he was brashly boasting about how he'd beat Diggory last week at some advanced levitation grade in charms, so maybe he should make it so Diggory 'just sort of' fell off his broom.

"Yeah, well," I said. "What a way to get a girl."

James blinked and pushed my elbow sourly. "Like Diggory didn't cheat."

I could hear Remus laughing nearby, but I didn't say anything. There wasn't much use; James was right or I was right, but he wasn't going to let himself be wrong. I saw him chewing thoughtlessly at the side of his lip, but I just looked back at the game.

"Sorry, mate. I know you've got that fantasy of shagging Lily's boyfriend." James said, sniggering. He had picked up a malicious streak since Lily started snogging in broom cupboards

Remus had stopped laughing, and it seemed like everyone around us had gone quiet, like James had been shouting at me. Maybe he was.

And I just glared. "You know," I told him, "you _know _how I feel about Diggory."

I didn't talk to James for hours, and I probably should have. We didn't normally fight, but when we did, we were more like bickering teenage girls. We never dueled. James hurt his enemies with spells. He didn't seem to realize that it was the words that made all things matter.

I wasn't much better.

I decided then that James didn't deserve Lily and I silently cursed him for his obsession. And, of course, I still just wanted my friend to stop thinking about her. I wanted him to stop thinking about Diggory.

I hated Amos Diggory. The world didn't need him. He was irresistible, and charming, and fucking gorgeous. And that's what Elisa Wood told me, just before Christmas. James still talked to him, still got tips from him in potions, and even talked Quiditch with him. Or at least he did until Lily asked Amos to Hogsmeade.

So as I fell into a small space between Lily and one of her friends, who immediately pushed her chest out a little and licked her lips, giving me these _eyes_, I glared at her.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing messing up everyone's lives?"

Lily looked at me as if I was a little speck of dirt on her shoe. I said Lily was nice before, right? Well, not to me. Her friend made this cute little noise that sounded suspiciously like 'prat' and then ignored me. I didn't really care. I just sneered at Lily.

"I didn't do anything to you, Black. Can't you sit somewhere, anywhere, where you're not bothering people."

"Can't help it, Evans, " I said. "You're just stuck with me." I wrapped an arm coolly around her. "I'm sure you need the warmth. Amos isn't going to be much use to you for a while, the way things are going."

"You're a jerk." She told me, but we both looked up at Diggory anyway, just to see he sported a rather large bruise on his left cheek and one of his arms didn't seem to be moving in line with the rest of his body. I couldn't remember him that way. "And so is James. Why do you have to hurt people to feel good about yourselves?"

I shrugged. I didn't really know what she was talking about, so I didn't say anything that might make me look stupid. So I repeated my question: "Why do you have to screw around with peoples' lives to be happy."

She let out something resembling a snort and something about how happiness is relative, and then told me to go away. Again, I didn't listen.

"AND TWENTY POINTS TO HUFFLEPUFF! " There was a deep groan and muted swearing. "_OUCH. _THAT HAS GOT TO HURT. THAT BETTER BE A PENALTY."

I wasn't listening to Alice Alstwick's commentary. They said she was part veela, and maybe she was, but her commentary favored whoever gave her the most galleons. I'm not saying I wouldn't spend three hours with her, if she let me do_ anything_ I wanted with her, but her commentary was dragon dung.

Lily shook her hair out of her face and crossed her arms over her chest. "Do you have any idea how many curses I could put on you?"

I laughed at her. "I don't know what He sees in you."

I didn't talk to her for the rest of the match. But when Hufflepuff lost and Slytherin won, and Lily still kissed Amos, I didn't know what to do.

So I punched him. He was standing right next to me, holding his broom he'd just slid off of with pride, almost as if he'd won. He still wore the marks of James's attack, and he had the nerve to stand next to me like I wasn't there, like he wasn't hurting my best mate just by being there next to Lily and next to me.

All wrongs on James's part were suddenly forgotten as Lily stared at me like she'd never seen me before. Every problem I'd ever had didn't seem to exist. She was looking at me as if she was pleading for her life, and I realized then that, to her, I was offering everything she didn't want herself to have. But I didn't understand why.

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James didn't talk to me for three weeks after the match. I don't know if he was mad at me; he just didn't talk. He'd sit with me in class and we'd work noiselessly together. He'd cast nonverbal spells on me sometimes and I'd shoat curse and charm after charm right back. But nothing he did to me was harmful. It was like everything was the same between us, just without words.

At night we'd sit in the common room, in a corner normally, blowing up spiders with dung bombs and throwing firecrackers at first years. James would talk to Remus, and Peter, too, when he wasn't feeling so high and mighty, but he still wouldn't talk to me.

Usually he'd spend his time staring over at Lily, who wasn't talking to him. She thought we were bad people. I don't think she understood then what it meant to have gone bad. Dark magic was everywhere when we were in school. It had always been around, always utilized by the worst of magic world, but by the time we were of age, dark magic was not only unavoidable, but also completely undecipherable.

But James and I were Gryffindors! And she was just prejudiced because James had levitated her skirt in first year so that for two classes, everyone saw her panties and she had no idea. That's what happens when you talk to eleven year old boys like their two just because you're a girl and 'therefore smarter.' They wreak havoc on your life.

It's too bad she was always such Prefect. She really did have a nice body.

Maybe it was because I was thinking like this that James wasn't talking to me.

A/N: I had a problem with the initial chapter of the story. I'm working with all of it now, but I'm not sure I have it right yet. My computer isn't working quite right at the moment. I replaced the first chapter with what it's supposed to be- I think I uploaded a first draft before. So this is the new chapter. I hope you like it.

Please read and review. The more reviews I get, the more I write.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: I Must've Spent Too Much Time Listening To James Ranting About Lily

By the James would talk to me again, I wasn't entirely interested in talking. My mother had sent me four Howlers in a week- a record for her- each one insisting I "NEVER DARE TOUCH HER PRECIOUS REGULUS!" The last of the four blew up with a puff of smoke that left scorch marks in my fringe for weeks, as if she didn't understand that you just don't blow up your son's hair. Consequently, I used her spell on a toilet in a fifth floor bathroom the next week and managed not only to leave the toilet seat-less and leaking great amounts of water, but to singe my brother's hair and a resultantly charm a deep-set odor to simmer from my brother for the following month as well (my mother sent no Howler for this, and I reckon my brother figured I was too volatile to suffer the reaction of him telling her). By the time James would talk to me again, I'd have rather hit him than be civil.

He said I was brooding. But really I wasn't. I happen to favor dark places- like the owlry in the west tower or the divination classroom (minus the subject). A man must have time, space, and a lack of light to think things through before he acts, I'd decided. The towers were silent, especially the astronomy tower. That was my favorite place to hide. And brood, if one must call it that.

I always related well to the stars; distant as they were so you could reach as far as you'd like but never catch one. I never thought too much on it, but if I was the way I'd have liked to be, or thought I was, I was like that. James didn't talk like that about things and about stars, so I didn't either, but it was the same way he thought of Lily- out of reach but too tempting not to try for it. Maybe he liked that sort of thing in people.

Pulling my feet up to rest on the stone frame that formed one of windows of the astronomy tower and pushing my back further into the other side of the frame, I stared far below me at the grounds. The night was streaked with the violets and pinks of the rising dusk, so tempting I felt I could fall into the twilight from my place on the window ledge, and I wouldn't completely mind. I probably wasn't thinking as much as I thought I was. I could see shapes moving against each other on the ground in a heated kiss near the forest; a girl pushing against a boy and the way he would push back again, their feet swinging in the lake; Vence, the newest Defense against the Dark Arts teacher strolled past Hagrid's cabin with burgundy robes billowing out above his ankles; Filch, the caretaker's apprentice who couldn't work a word of magic though I probably shouldn't have known, sourly kicked some dirt back into a green house.

A waved a curse at him with a half-concealed wand, but I didn't wait to watch the jelly legs take form. Instead I watch the couple by the lake, laughing and holding hands while she tossed her vibrant, red hair around. Molly Prewitt, I decided. I'd grown up with Molly (rather distantly, but she was at all the stuffy Christmas) and I knew hair like that anywhere. His glasses glinted off surface of the lake as he stretched his lanky arms out in front of him, keeping her fingers through his.

I had to believe I could have that. I had girls eyeing me constantly, and James had that too. Thinking of James, and I would rather have not to, the boy down by the water tossing about his long arms and legs became him, and slowly Molly became Lily.

Content with simply sitting there like they were the only two people in the entire world, she shoved him with a little laugh. Her cheeks were rosy and a little pained from smiling so big, but she kept on giggling anyway as he splashed a little water on her.

"Lily! You've really hurt me!"

She giggled again, the way she never did in any near, noticed vicinity of James, and she splashed him back, dragging the water up to him with her bare foot. He caught it easily, chaser as he was, and kissed the bone just above her baby toe, and then made a face like he could never bear anything so horrible, exaggerating the gesture just enough she'd know he couldn't ever think that.

He mumbled something, she didn't understand and then repeated it when she made her own sort of face at him to gesture lack of hearing. "Tastes like giant squid," he told her, mocking an attempt to choke and then hurl, though that may not have been what he said in the first place. Probably wasn't. And he kissed her anklebone, and then pulled her skirt up enough to kiss each of her knees and the inside of her thigh, then buried his head in her stomach. She held him carefully there, bringing her fingers though his hair, and she blushed as she brought his head up enough that she could kiss him.

He splashed her with water as she did, and I stopped watching Lily and James so I could see Molly smile at redheaded boy beside her as he then leaned over to kiss her. James would have something like that, he deserved it, and I had to do my best to give it to him. Even if he didn't want to talk to me.

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James looked at me Monday morning with big, bloodshot eyes, like he'd stated up all night studying. I looked at him closely through once-again-perfect black hair, and I knew that wasn't it.

"Where were you last night, mate?" He raised a heavy eyebrow and I shrugged at him, and threw my feet over the table, grinning at him.

"Oy! Did you need wet your sheets and need a change?"

He shot me a scalding look, but the effect slowly softened. He grinned back at me in truce.

I looked over at Peter a meter down the bench from James, taking in the way his lips pulled inward as he inhaled in his sleep. His head was collapsed on his chubby little arms, and his lips puckered out in an exhale. He snored softly over fat little fingers.

"Astronomy tower," I said lackadaisically because where else would I be?

I saw Lily walk into the hall with hair colored a booger-green color. Her smile suggested that it was the most normal day in the world, and she held steadfast to three spell books that wouldn't fit into the heavy-laden, suede bag that kept banging against her knees. A laugh escaped me, sounding more like a bark to my own ears, though James seemed to get the general idea of it. He looked over at her, his eyes lighting up with mischief and glee, but a little glazed over too.

"Oy, Evans!" he called across the hall from our place at the Gryffindor table. There were too many pointed hats between the doors and us, but Lily heard us clearly, and saw us just as well. The middle book of the three dropped to the floor, and as it echoed through the hall I realized that no one spoke. But James laughed. "Who blew their nose on your hair?"

Lily didn't understand him, but she knew something was wrong. She must've known from the time she dropped her book onward. She kept walking though, on and on until she was behind my bench, ignoring me easily and looking at James like she could step on him and that would be all right.

"_What_ did you do, Potter?" she sounded tired, despite how cheerful she had seemed before. I think I preferred her smile; it didn't cut so deeply at my nerves.

James shrugged and smiled up at her lazily, though his demeanor seemed suddenly jolly. "A little this, a little that. Just a few spells, you know."

Lily leaned in closer to him, over my shoulder, and I could see Dumbledore carefully not noticing them, chewing on a piece of sausage and trying to engage McGonagall in conversation, though the only one who listened was Professor Vence. Lily's wand was tightly clutched in her hand, but I could only see the tip of it poking out of her robes near my temple. It was dangerously close to my already traumatized hair.

"I _said_:_ what-did-you-do?" _She pronounced the words hard enunciation, her voice deathly quiet.

But James smiled and shook his head. "You're a fiery one, aren't you?"

Lily let out a shriek, and I turned to look at her and look at James, and look at her again, trying to tell her, show her how she was hurting him. _Do you like fucking over everybody you possibly can, Lily Evans?_ Her brilliantly glittering eyes were too big too look in, and I think she was crying because she took in a raggedy breath, and the she stalked down the table and sat next to a girl named Adria Bell.

"It's too bad, mate." I told him, just like I always did when Lily was mentioned. He shrugged and I raised an eyebrow, and we both grinned just as we usually did. Girls would never break our friendship as long as Lily Evans never got to close.

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James tossed a snitch he nicked ages over my way, and I tossed it at Wormtail's head. James grabbed it as Peter smacked the place the little, golden ball had landed, and then threw at me again, smiling faintly. Peter had long since given up on catching passes and no longer clapped whenever we caught it instead, but I could still hear him in my head whenever James made a particularly difficult throw of it and still managed to toss it or catch it wherever he wanted.

James slumped against a tree with a stub of a trunk and fat, tangled branches that crawled over the ground and then up into the air. I couldn't see him from my place over the slump of a hill. My vision twisted upside-down and was blocked a little by the soft, verdant grass around me. Far on the other side of the lack, the side closest to the castle, I could see two pairs of knees, with a skirt wrapped around each, bending over the grass and into the dark water.

Remus lay with his head adjacent to mine, loosely holding a book down the hill but above our heads. He looked at me, blinking like it was too bright for him, and I understood what he meant: you couldn't think out here in light like this.

Catching the snitch, I dropped onto the hand lying on Remus's chest, and I looked back up at the sky, making out whatever shapes I could see. I wasn't any sort of romantic, but I would swear to this day I saw James and Lily, kissing, in the clouds.

A/N: Thank you soooo much to people who've reviewed. Especially to OTHCharmedHPFreak- you've reviewed all my HP stuff and put it on your favorites list, and that's just kinda amazing Also, thank you to SeekingSnitch for putting this story on your favorites list.

Not knocking that, really, please review if you read this. I flourish on comments and advice, and knowing the exact thing you like and don't like. Even if you just write to say 'it sucks' or 'cool,' that's enough.

This chapter was WAY too inspired by Radiohead's 'OK Computer,' particularly the song 'Climbing Up the Walls.'


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